1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to automated methods for creating offers for items to a customer. Especially, the invention is related to such a method as specified in the preamble of the independent method claim.
2. Description of Related Art
Preparing of offers is a time consuming task for salesmen, who are offering a large selection of products to customer, who stock many different products. In order to produce an efficient offer, the salesman should check which of his products the customer already has and which the customer does not have, and include in the offer only those products which the customer does not have. This checking is a time consuming task, however. For example, a salesman of a publishing company can have hundreds of titles to sell, and his customers such as book shops and libraries can have tens of thousands of titles. The salesman can naturally send an offer to a prospective client listing all his products, but if personnel of the client is required to wade through a long list of products, the effectiveness of the offer can be very low.
Electronic product database systems have been used for a long time, and in some branches of commerce, suppliers and customers have connected their systems in order to automate production of offers and other steps in performing commerce. However, these systems have traditionally been based on custom tailored solutions, whereby they are laborous and costly to implement. These properties have limited the use of these so called EDI (electronic document interchange) systems to high-volume transactions between large corporations.
Many businesses already have electronic commerce sites in the internet, and the significance of e-commerce is increasing rapidly. The internet allows even small businesses to perform electronic commerce. Many conventional shops have launched internet sites for their customers to browse through their product selection and place orders. Despite these developments, good solutions for connecting the systems of different parties in the productionxe2x80x94distributionxe2x80x94sales chain over the internet have not been developed.
An object of the invention is to realize a method and a system for preparing offer documents, which automate a large part of the work performed by a salesman in preparing an offer. A further object of the invention is to realize a method and a system for preparing offer documents, which allow a salesman easily to concentrate on such products in a large selection of products which a customer does not already have.
The objects are reached by automatically querying an user interface of a product database catalog of a customer for each item in a set of items, examining the responses to the queries to find out if the queried item was available, and if the queried item was not available, the item is included in an offer document.
The method according to the invention is characterized by that, which is specified in the characterizing part of the independent method claim. The system according to the invention is characterized by that, which is specified in the characterizing part of the independent claim directed to a system. The computer program product according to the invention is characterized by that, which is specified in the characterizing part of the independent claim directed to a computer program product. The dependent claims describe further advantageous embodiments of the invention.
The invention is based on the basic idea, that a public product database such as a product list or shop interface on a widely available network such as the internet is used of automatically checking, if products in a certain set of products are already present or not. According to the invention, an automated system queries an user interface of a customer""s product catalog database. The user interface can be for example a www (world wide web) server of the customer""s network site, which allows searching for products available at the customer""s service. The system queries each item in a set of items, and examines the results output from the user interface. Electronic commerce sites typically allow a user to enter a query for a product, and then reply with a response document detailing the results of the query, i.e. if the queried product was found, and if any such products are presently available and possibly also in how large numbers. The system receives the response document after each query, and examines the response document to find out, if the response indicates that the customer has the queried product available or not. If the customer has the product available, the system queries for the next item in the set of items, and if not, the item is included in the offer document. The resulting offer document consequently lists only such items, which the customer does not have. If the response document indicates the number of products available, the system can include the queried item in the offer document, if the number is below a predefined threshold. This allows the offer document to list also those products, that are nearly finished. The set of items can be all products being marketed by the company of the salesperson, or a limited subset of the products chosen to suit the needs of the customer. The system can be implemented in many different ways. For example, the system can be implemented as a server, to which salespersons can make remote connections. The system can also be implemented in a portable computer, whereby the salesperson only needs a connection to the customer""s site. The invention can easily be applied in such fields of commerce, in which the products have commonly agreed or known identifying information. The following table lists a few examples of such products in order to illustrate the wide range of fields of commerce in which the invention is applicable:
This table shows only a few examples, and the invention is not limited to any way to use associated with those products.
In addition to use for producing offer documents, the inventive concept can also be used for example for collecting market information about other companies. For example, a company can use the inventive system for automatically collecting information about the status of product stocks of the competitors of the company.
Such information can be used to monitor the actions of other companies, and for example to monitor the flow of products of other companies.